County's growth gets rough outline

Friday

Sep 27, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Thousands of acres of prime farmland would be preserved in San Joaquin County and more residents would live and work near mass transit by 2040 under a rough plan that officials agreed Thursday deserves further study.

Alex Breitler

Thousands of acres of prime farmland would be preserved in San Joaquin County and more residents would live and work near mass transit by 2040 under a rough plan that officials agreed Thursday deserves further study.

The plan - really just an outline for the time being - doesn't go as far as some slow-growth advocates would like, while one representative of the building industry warned it may not be achievable.

But the San Joaquin Council of Governments earned approval from its board to use the outline as the foundation for a major transportation blueprint due early next year.

"It's a good start," San Joaquin County Supervisor and council board member Steve Bestolarides said while cautioning that market forces make it difficult to predict exactly how growth will occur in the future.

For the first time, state law requires regional transportation plans to also consider land use, with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Cities will still have the authority to plan growth as they see fit, but billions of dollars in funding will be allocated to roads, rails and other transportation projects if they are consistent with the new plan. That, in turn, will influence where and how growth takes place.

For several months, officials have studied four scenarios ranging from the historic trend of cities expanding outward to a new emphasis on higher density and different housing types.

The outline accepted Thursday was portrayed as a kind of "ambitious but achievable" middle ground.

Some advocates pushed for the more aggressive scenario. Katelyn Roedner, with the Catholic Charities' Environmental Justice Project, told the board that single-family homes are not affordable for many county residents and said the plan should include more multifamily housing.

"I think we can do better," she said. "I think we need to do better. I think we owe it to all of our citizens - old, young, rich, poor, everybody - to have a variety of housing near transit, near good, head-of-household jobs."

John Beckman, head of the Building Industry Association of the Delta, said most Americans still want single-family homes. He argued the scenario ultimately approved by the board might be too aggressive.

"We might not get there," he said. "We might fail. We might miss the mark."

But most who spoke to the board Thursday night favored either the scenario that was approved or the most aggressive of the four alternatives.

Stockton City Councilman Moses Zapien made a motion that the council use the most aggressive scenario as a starting point, but that motion failed to earn a second. A draft plan is due later this fall.